Maintenance & repairs
Most of what fails on a residential water system is one of about eight things, and most of it is cheap. We service what we installed and what somebody else installed — including the systems whose company left town and took the parts catalog with it.
- Response
- Same/next day
- Diagnostic
- $95, waived on repair
- Brands
- All major valves
- After hours
- Leak calls answered
- Annual plan
- From $180/yr
- Warranty
- 1 yr on our labor
Find your symptom before you call.
Half of these you can resolve yourself in twenty minutes, and we would rather you did. The other half we would rather see before a small failure becomes a rebedding.
Water went hard again, salt tank looks full
Salt bridge, salt mushing, or exhausted resin
SoftenerRO faucet dribbles, tank feels heavy
Lost bladder air charge, or a clogged prefilter starving the membrane
ROPressure dropped across the whole house
Loaded cartridge, channeled media bed, or a valve stuck mid-cycle
Whole-houseChlorine smell came back
Carbon media is spent — typically five to eight years, sooner on heavy use
Whole-houseSoftener runs a regeneration every day
Meter fault, wrong hardness programmed, or a leaking toilet inflating the count
SoftenerSalt tank has standing water in it
Drain line obstruction, failed brine valve, or a drain jammed below a P-trap
SoftenerRO water tastes flat or metallic
Spent post-carbon polish, or a membrane past its TDS threshold
ROWater discolored after ECUA worked on the street
Sediment loading — bypass, flush the house from a hose bib, change the prefilter early
AnySoftener specifics are broken down further on the softener page; RO tank and membrane troubleshooting is on the reverse osmosis page.
Diagnose before quoting. Always in that order.
You get a $95 diagnostic that is waived if you go ahead with the repair, and a written finding either way — including when the finding is that nothing is wrong with your equipment.
- 01
Static and dynamic pressure at the bib
Before anything else. A system blamed for low pressure is frequently innocent — a lot of older housing stock in this area starts at 45–55 psi and a filter is not what took it there.
- 02
Bypass test
Put the system in bypass and re-measure. Five seconds of work that isolates whether the problem is your equipment or your plumbing, and it settles most arguments immediately.
- 03
Valve cycle, step by step
Manually advance the control head through backwash, brine draw, slow rinse, fast rinse and refill, watching the drain at each step. A valve that will not draw brine announces itself here.
- 04
Hardness in, hardness out
Titration on both sides of the softener, taken immediately after a manual regeneration. This is what separates exhausted resin from a brine problem, and it takes about four minutes.
- 05
TDS across the membrane
On RO systems, incoming versus product. Past roughly 15% pass-through the membrane is finished no matter what date is on it.
- 06
A written finding
What we measured, what it means, what it costs to fix, and what happens if you do nothing. Some of those findings are “this is fine, change the prefilter and call us in a year.”
Or just let us keep track of it.
Cartridge intervals are the thing everybody intends to remember and nobody does. A neglected prefilter is what turns a $90 cartridge into a $400 membrane.
RO Care
$180 / year
One visit, all cartridges, membrane checked by TDS.
- Sediment, carbon and polish cartridges
- TDS across the membrane, logged
- Bladder tank pressure set to spec
- Faucet, tubing and drain saddle checked
Whole-House Care
$240 / year
Annual inspection on carbon and softener, with salt delivery optional.
- Full valve cycle and drain verification
- Hardness titration in and out
- Brine tank inspected for bridging and mush
- Media life projected with a replacement date
Whole-House + RO
$360 / year
Everything above on one visit, priority scheduling on breakdowns.
- Both plans combined, one trip
- Priority booking on service calls
- 10% off parts and media
- Written annual condition report
If the company that sold it is gone, the system usually isn’t.
A large share of our service work is on equipment installed by outfits that no longer exist — door-to-door sellers, franchises that folded, whoever was operating in the subdivision when it was built. Homeowners are frequently told the whole system has to be replaced because parts are unavailable.
That is usually untrue. Most residential softeners in this market run one of a small number of control valves regardless of what name is on the jacket, and those valves are rebuildable with standard parts. The tank and the resin outlast the company by decades.
Send us a photo of the valve head and the label on the tank. We can generally tell you what you actually have, and whether it is worth keeping, before we drive out.
Who shows up
- Dell Whitmire — twenty-two years on control valves, most of it in Escambia County. Does the diagnostics.
- Rosalie Nguyen-Pratt — installs, permits and exterior loops. Handles the county side so you do not have to.
- Cade Bertolini — RO, cartridge service and the annual maintenance runs.
Something stopped working?
Tell us the make if you know it, the symptom if you do not, and roughly how old the system is. A photo of the valve head is worth more than any of that.